Well... This is embarassing...

After about 6 months I finally managed to hunt down my DeusDraconus YouTube channel, which has most of my Bryce tutorials to it.

When YouTube made Google+ the compulsory bridge for Gmail and YouTube my passwords got scrambled and I couldn't get into the DeusDraconus channel – the one that hosts my Bryce tutorials. I couldn't even pass the DeusDraconus comments to a different IMAP account to see what was being done there. I finally managed to crack my own code and get into the DeusDracous channel... and found quite a few comments and subscriptions to it. This is great. But not replying to them... not-so-great.

So, many apologies to those of you who left comments and were greeted with over a year's worth of silence. I tried viewing several links left there, but the videos had either been deleted, or were caught in the same Google account purgatory that I was stranded in and have been blocked.

Suffice to say, very sorry, I've made fixes, and I'll be sure to get another vid up on Bryce animation there shortly.

... Any suggestions for a tutorial? I've been thinking about doing one on repeating sequences... or animating materials... or parenting vs groups... Or something I call the Speed Optimisation Pass, which is basically doing what you can to speed up render times... Just suggestions about moving things: Herr Wernli and Mr. Brinnen have HDRI and materials pretty well covered :) Or, if you have a animation you're stuck on, let me know and I'll use it as a project piece to teach with.

Post edited by Oroboros on November 2013

Comments

A very simple basic ...flying over a landscape for someone who knows nothing about animation would be cool ...Thanks Trish p.s. or maybe like someone walking down a path as seen through their eyes....and what they are seeing

Thanks for the heads-up, Oro. I'm not going into animation anytime soon. I fear that I would lose myself in it and there is yet so much to discover for stills. But I do appreciate that you push animation. There are too many silent animation "gurus" that neither show what they do nor share their knowledge.

in fact, this will lead me to touch on a bigger topic: the difference between States and Parameters. Sounds dreadfully academic, I know, but seriously: it takes about 12-15s to explain, and then we can get on with the fun stuff of showing you how it applies to textures, materials, shapes, movements... Just about everything.

I'm wanting to know if one can do actual figure animation in Bryce. I have managed to do a space-ship in orbit animation sequence then a terrain view zoom in, but I want a creature to walk out of a crate -

Cant seem to get an animated sequence of the creature from DAZ Studio to import into Bryce. Any idea? or it this pretty much impossible for Bryce - which would be a pity as I love the way things look in the Bryce render rather than Studio render. Carrara would do it, but I'm still learning about some features and cant quite get the same look and lighting qualities that Bryce delivers.

I'm wanting to know if one can do actual figure animation in Bryce. I have managed to do a space-ship in orbit animation sequence then a terrain view zoom in, but I want a creature to walk out of a crate -

Cant seem to get an animated sequence of the creature from DAZ Studio to import into Bryce. Any idea? or it this pretty much impossible for Bryce - which would be a pity as I love the way things look in the Bryce render rather than Studio render. Carrara would do it, but I'm still learning about some features and cant quite get the same look and lighting qualities that Bryce delivers.

Hi keryna,

Figure animation... is clunky in Bryce. I don't have much experience in DAZ Studio, but I do know that ani-blocks do not transport into Bryce. Nor can you set angle limits, weight painting, tolerance values, inverse kinetic (IK) relationships or various other modern tools ("modern" meaning 2005 and later) for animation in Bryce. Models and scenes can bridge over, but not animation with any degree of success. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news there.

BUT...

This isn't the way most people work with animation anyway. Most use different programs to get the results. If you prefer animating in Studio, but would like to use Bryce for other stuff, that's when you need to latch onto composite editing techniques. You could greenscreen your creature work in DAZ, and key it into a Bryce environment, for instance.

I'm afraid I won't tell you how you do this, because once you start using multiple tools it really comes down to what tools you're using and how you're planning your scenes.

There's current video on "Shimmer" in my tutorial set, which is a gentle intro to what's required for composite editing using Apple's Final Cut Express, but the bottom line is: there are various ways you can animate shots in different programs and bring them together for a unified shot. I understand that Bryce's render engine is superior to DAZ Studio, and that what I'm suggesting doesn't allow you to render a moving creature in Bryce. But sadly, DAZ Studio is maintained. Bryce is not, and it's animation features haven't changed at all since they were added in Bryce3D 16 years ago.

In Bryce 6.3 animations from DS to Bryce worked great...One of my beta animations I had a Vicky running and it was great...Then it got broken and never fixed properly...Tree's would play nicely if they fixed the problem of saving animated data to a bryce library...

Thanks...Been a long time...Havent really done any 3D other then a few minutes here and there in the last year...
Life,work and an artists block from the black hole...Creativity coming back and was able to save some of my stuff from NOT just one HDD failure but Two...

In Bryce 6.3 animations from DS to Bryce worked great...One of my beta animations I had a Vicky running and it was great...Then it got broken and never fixed properly...Tree's would play nicely if they fixed the problem of saving animated data to a bryce library...

Hey FoleyPro, great to see you back :)

Yeah... I know people have successfully brought Bryce animations in from Studio. But, like your experience, there's always something around the corner, waiting to screw you up.

I've finished the scripting and started the rendering for a Material Animation tutorial coming up soon – I hope to complete it this weekend. And there are things I just won't cover, because there are areas of animation in Bryce that are too inconsistent, and I consider it irresponsible of me to tell people how something MIGHT work, because people assume it WILL work. And then I get ongoing questions or complaints about the frustrations they have in following the demos.

Bryce 7.1, for instance, introduced video materials. Not only is it decidedly flawed itself, its inclusion has made normal material animations across the board in Bryce 7.1 disasterously unreliable. Someone might be eagerly designing a scene for an animated material, only to find a) it doesn't work; b) It crashed Bryce, and; c) it corrupted the file you were working on.

First Impression: Not Good.

However, material animation in B6.3 and earlier is still excellent. With B7.1... you might be rolling dice a little.